Automated traffic route identification through the shared nearest neighbour algorithm

Many organisations need to extract useful information from huge amounts of movement data. One example is found in maritime transportation, where the automated identification of a diverse range of traffic routes is a key management issue for improving the maintenance of ports and ocean routes, and accelerating ship traffic. This paper addresses, in a first stage, the research challenge of developing an approach for the automated identification of traffic routes based on clustering motion vectors rather than reconstructed trajectories. The immediate benefit of the proposed approach is to avoid the reconstruction of trajectories in terms of their geometric shape of the path, their position in space, their life span, and changes of speed, direction and other attributes over time. For clustering the moving objects, an adapted version of the Shared Nearest Neighbour algorithm is used. The motion vectors, with a position and a direction, are analysed in order to identify clusters of vectors that are moving towards the same direction. These clusters represent traffic routes and the preliminary results have shown to be promising for the automated identification of traffic routes with different shapes and densities, as well as for handling noise data.

Success factors of regional airports: the case of Oporto airport

Oporto Airport (OPO) is a success story among European regional airports. This success is expressed, among other ways, in the rapid expansion of routes and the strong growth in demand, as well as in the recognition of the airport’s quality by its users. Over the past decade, the volume of traffic increased by almost 3.4 million passengers, from the 2.6 million recorded in 2002 to over 6 million in 2012. In this paper, we analyse some of the factors that influenced the success of Oporto Airport, namely the expansion of capacity and improvements to infrastructure, the increase in the number of routes and the increased demand in response to the new capacities of this airport-airlines set. Particular emphasis is given to the role of low cost carriers (LCC) in the growth of Oporto Airport and to strategies of attracting more traffic. Some of the main opportunities and challenges that this airport will face in the coming years are also discussed.